Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill) Read online

  The quadrangle had been decorated for the picnic. The buildings might be shabby and the sidewalks cracked—as fit in with the school’s “cover story” of being a down-at-heels dumping ground for kids nobody wanted—but today the buildings were hung with bunting and garlanded with balloons.

  The tables were all set up in the central area, and behind them were more tables near the barbeque grills. Tomas’s class had actually made the grills down at the Garage, since they were a couple of old fifty-gallon oil drums cut in half, with legs welded on. When you were cooking for fifty, you wanted to be able to cook a lot at a time. Tubs full of ice and drinks were already set out, and when he saw that, Tomas suggested that Rosalita go and help herself.

  “Can I really?”

  “You’re coming to the picnic, right? Go ahead.”

  Rosalita giggled with delight and ran off in the direction of the tubs of ice.

  “Now what the hell was that all about?” Tomas demanded, as soon as Rosalita was safely out of earshot. When he turned around, he saw Ms. Smith heading toward them from the Main Building at a dead run.

  “Tomas—” Mr. Bishop began.

  “Hi, guys, did I miss anything?” Ms. Smith said. The sunlight sparkled blindingly off her red-white-and-blue sequined t-shirt. She glanced in the direction of Rosa. “Whoa,” she said.

  “Exactly,” Mr. Bishop said. He turned to Tomas. “Tomas, it seems that you aren’t the only Talent in your family.”

  Tomas glanced back at Rosa. She was standing by the ice-tub, a can of Coke in her hand, talking to a couple of the other students, a boy and a girl close to her own age.

  Not the only Talent?

  “What?”

  “Tomas, when Rosalita stepped out of the van, both Ms. Clifford and I could Read her. And Kayla can too, from all the way over here. Her Talent is very strong. So is mine—psychometry—and I touched her to find out more about hers. I’m fairly sure that Rosalita is a Medium.”

  “What? You mean she talks to dead people?” Tomas thought about all of Rosa’s invisible friends, but Mr. Bishop was already shaking his head.

  “Not necessarily. Or… not exactly. A Medium is a Sensitive with the specific power to communicate with discarnate intelligences—living things that might not have bodies. They could be spirits of the dead, yes, or that might simply be their normal form. If she’s powerful enough—and I think she is—she also has the power to wake those that are sleeping. And if she’s really powerful, she can Call those beings to her across the Planes, becoming a tool for their manifestation—their arrival—here.”

  Tomas stared at Mr. Bishop in sick horror, unable to believe what he was hearing. He shook his head slowly. No. Not his perfect little sister. He might have to lead a life like this, learning to fight and to hide. Not her.

  “Tomas, we gotta get her into the school,” Ms. Smith said. “Now. I bet she’s already hearing voices, right? Has been for a while? That’s got to stop. It’s got to be stopped. She may not be hearing a lot of them yet, but there’s gonna be more all the time, and I’m telling you, if you think there are things out there that want to eat you, well, for a Medium it’s a million times worse. A lot of those things without bodies are gonna want hers.”

  “I don’t believe you!” Tomas said desperately. “I won’t! Rosalita isn’t a freak!”

  “Tomas—” Ms. Smith said.

  “No!”

  He ran over to where Rosalita was talking to Nina and Vanh. He forced himself to take a deep breath and smile. He wasn’t going to frighten her again, not the way he had the day he’d first discovered his fire. She was just starting to trust him, to believe in him, again, and he wouldn’t do anything to destroy that.

  “Come on, Rosa. Let’s go find Mama.”

  Mrs. Torres was just walking across the lawn with Señora Clifford when Tomas headed back in the other direction with Rosalita in tow. The two women were talking animatedly, and Mrs. Torres was smiling hopefully.

  Tomas was trying to figure out how to explain to his mother—well, he wasn’t quite sure what—when Consuelo Torres enveloped him in a sudden fierce hug.

  “You must be good, now, Tomas!” she said. “You’ve been given a second chance!”

  “I will, Mamacita. I promise,” Tomas said.

  “Well,” Ms. Smith said brightly, coming up to them. “Shall we take the tour?”

  For the next forty minutes the six of them walked through the small campus, and Tomas couldn’t find any way to get Mamacita alone and tell her that she had to take Rosalita away from here now. Señora Clifford talked about the many advantages of attending St. Rhia’s—the small classes, the individual attention, the college and vocational courses. Mrs. Torres was very impressed with the library, as well as with the fact that each of the students was issued a computer for their personal use.

  “We find that it’s helpful in encouraging study skills,” Mr. Bishop said cheerfully.

  “We hope that you’ll consider letting your daughter come here as well,” Señora Clifford said. She darted an apologetic glance at Tomas. “You see, St. Rhia’s is a very special school. It’s for children who are gifted in the way that we understand your daughter is gifted. You see, your daughter has a very strong psychic gift—you’d probably know it as Mediumship. It’s rare, but it’s not completely uncommon, and I’m sure you’ve already seen some evidence of it. It’s nothing at all to worry about. With the special training and help that she can receive here at St. Rhia’s, Rosalita can go on to live a perfectly normal life—even use her ability if she wishes to. Of course—”

  “No!” Mrs. Torres stared at Señora Clifford as if she’d suddenly grown horns. “What are you saying to me? Are you all insano? My daughter isn’t una bruja! She’s a good Catholic!”

  “Mrs. Torres, this isn’t witchcraft,” Señora Clifford said carefully. “Your daughter’s Talent has nothing to do with magic. It’s very real. And if she doesn’t receive special training, things could become very difficult for her very quickly.”

  (“Yeah,” Tomas heard Ms. Smith mutter, “like when she starts to hear voices that nobody else does.”)

  “They will not! I will take care of mi propia carne y sangre! The moment I get home I will place her in a convent, and the Holy Sisters will pray all the darkness out of her—as they could not with her father!”

  Oh, no. Suddenly, just as Tomas had realized there were much worse things than being a pyrokinetic, he realized that there were much worse things for Rosalita than coming to St. Rhia’s. He still didn’t want to believe she had a Talent, but… what if she did? He thought about Chris, who’s parents had put him in a mental hospital, and other kids here, whose parents had tried to “retrain” them to be “normal” in other ways.

  “Mama, there’s nothing wrong with Rosa! She doesn’t need anything prayed out of her. If you—If you let her come her—for maybe just a few months, you could see—”

  “No! Rosalita, come here at once!” Rosalita started toward her mother, but before she could take more than a step or two, Mrs. Torres darted forward and grabbed her, clutching her to herself so hard that the ten-year-old squeaked in surprise. “We are leaving immediately! Tomas! I want you to come with us!”

  Tomas shook his head slowly. “I can’t do that, Mama. Please, you have to let Rosalita stay.”

  “Mama, we’re not leaving? But—”

  “Quiet! And you, Tomas, do they say you are a witch, too? Do they say that my only son has the Devil in him?”

  “Mama, it’s not El Diablo, it’s not magic, it’s science—Rosalita has to stay here, to learn—”

  “Oh, Mama, I want to stay here—everyone’s so nice, and they know about people like me—”

  “Be quiet! From now on, you are not my son, and I will pray to the Blessed Virgin on my knees that it is not too late to save my daughter!” Mrs. Torres turned away and began dragging Rosalita with her. It took a moment for Rosalita to really realize what was happening, but once she did she began to cry, plea
ding with her mother to go back, to let her stay-

  “I’m going after them,” Tomas said.

  “No.”

  Inigo Moonlight had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. He put a hand on Tomas’s shoulder and frowned warningly at Ms. Smith—from the look on her face, she felt about the way Tomas did.

  “But—” Tomas protested.

  “She is far too upset to listen to anyone right now. Give her half an hour to collect her thoughts. Tammerlane is ten miles from here. She cannot possibly reach it in that time. We will send Ms. Clifford after her in one of the automobiles, and perhaps, by then, she will be willing to listen to words of reason and counsel. If not, we must find another way to help your sister,” Mr. Moonlight said.

  “If we can’t, we’ll be seeing her here in a few years anyway,” Mr. Bishop said sadly. “One way or another.”

  Consuelo Torres was walking down the long hill that led to the main road. Her feet hurt, and her good shoes would be ruined by the time they reached the bus terminal, but she was too angry and frightened to care. These people—these people who had her Tomas—said her daughter was a witch, and in her heart Consuelo knew it was true, for hadn’t her little Rosa, the rose of her heart, been speaking to the spirits of the air for years? When she was only a baby, she’d said her dolls spoke to her, and at first Consuelo had dismissed it as the games all children played, especially lonely children, for Rosalita had never been one to make friends, but when Rosalita had begun to tell her some of the things her dolls said…

  Consuelo had burned them all, every one, and prayed that the evil was gone from her house.

  But it wasn’t. It was in Rosa, and she would do anything she had to do to root it out. And she would go home, go to the people at the estación de la television, and tell them all just what sort of school this was. They would help her.

  She tightened her grip on Rosa’s arm. Rosalita was usually so good, so quiet. And now she was screaming, crying, acting like a wild thing. More proof that the school was a bad place.

  “Mama! You have to listen! I want to go to St. Rhia’s! I want to stay here! Everything they said about me is true! I do hear voices! Mama, sometimes they frighten me! Mama, I am like the other children there—if they know about things like what I can do, maybe they can tell me about it—Mama, maybe they can make the bad voices stop—”

  “No! You aren’t a witch, you aren’t cursed in the blood—you have the Devil in you! I tried to pray him out of you, but I wasn’t strong enough! You’ll go to the convent, and you’ll say prayers all day long under the eye of the Virgin Herself, and if you have to pray until you’re old and grey—” thatBoth of them were shouting so loudly that they didn’t hear it at first. Suddenly Consuelo did—a loud crashing in the woods. She put both hands on Rosalita and shook her violently enough to make her fall silent.

  “We must run, hija.” Her only thought was that those gente traviesa from that horrible school had sent people after her to kidnap her precious Rosalita and kill her to keep her from telling everyone what they were. But the sounds were much too loud.

  She barely managed a few steps when something struck her, knocking her to the narrow road. She rolled onto her back in time to see a dark blurred shape—clutching Rosalita—vanish into the woods.

  She screamed.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Tomas was still standing in the middle of the quadrangle, wondering how the day could have gone from “okay” to “complete disaster” in the space of a heartbeat, when he heard a crash. Kurt had collapsed, knocking over one of the tubs of drinks. A couple of the other kids were on their knees, too.

  And Ms. Smith had gone white with pain. She pointed. In the direction Mamacita and Rosalita had gone. Tomas didn’t need any more information. He took off running.

  He’d always been a fast runner—it was a survival skill in the barrio—and his time at St. Rhia’s—good food and plenty of exercise—had only made him faster. It took him less than five minutes to reach the place—only a few hundred yards down the drive—where his mother had stopped. Rosalita wasn’t there.

  Consuelo Torres was sobbing hysterically—incapable of talking—but not so out of control that she couldn’t direct help toward her daughter. She pointed off into the woods, and Tomas ran in that direction without a single thought as to what he might be chasing.

  The trail was easy to follow. This wasn’t an Elven Wildwood or a State Park; the underbrush was messy and tangled, and something—something big—had smashed and trampled it.

  And suddenly—up ahead—he could see a flash of pink.

  Rosa’s dress.

  He’d slowed down a little when he got into the trees. Now he speeded up, running all-out again, because he could hear her crying, no, screaming, and she was his Rosalita, his hermana, and she should never make sounds like that, never.

  He was close enough to see what had taken Rosalita now, and if he hadn’t been at St. Rhia’s for almost three months, if he hadn’t been on the school’s little “field trips”, he would have stopped dead and panicked. Lost his temper, lost his head, done something dangerous and stupid.

  But he didn’t.

  A thing was holding Rosa. It was big—she looked like a doll in its hands. It was dark in here under the trees, but the thing was even darker, hard to see, the way something you tried to look at outside in the middle of the night would be. It made his eyes hurt to look at it. Big, and hairy—or blurry, he wasn’t sure—and shaped like a comic book monster: tiny short legs and long arms that nearly brushed the ground. Colored lights swirled around its head. As they touched it, they vanished, and it cackled with glee, a deep grating sound that actually made Tomas sick to hear.

  And it got bigger.

  He wasn’t imagining it. It sucked in the lights, and it grew.

  It hadn’t seen him yet. When it did, it might run, or it might attack. He had a split-second to decide what to do. He could use his fire against it. But it was holding Rosalita, flung half over one shoulder. Tomas had to decide—right now—did he have enough control over his fire to hit the monster and not hurt his sister? If he was wrong, he could kill her.

  ‘You have to decide now, Tomas. Either you control your fire, or your fire controls you. There’s no third choice.” Mr. Bishop had said that to him.

  I control my fire.

  He raised his hands and extended them, feeling the power wake up from wherever it slept when he wasn’t using it. Heat swept through his veins, and tiny white-hot pellets of pure Fire shot from his fingertips: the pure essence of Fire, hawter and more intense than anything he had ever Called before in his life. They sprayed out over the monster, striking its legs, its torso, the arm that wasn’t holding his sister-

  They had no effect.

  Except for one. The monster saw him. And for a moment Tomas thought—hoped—it would attack him, because then he could run, run back to the road, toward help, leading it after him.

  But it didn’t. It merely laughed louder, that grating nerve-rending cackling…

  And vanished.

  One moment it was there, in the clearing, surrounded by a web of dancing lights, sucking them in, growing.

  The next it was gone.

  Tomas ran forward, unable to believe it.

  “Rosa!” he shouted. “Rosa!”

  There was no answer. No sign of her. Only the trampled grass and broken bushes—the only indication at all that something had been here—and a few charred places where sparks from his fire-pellets had drifted to earth. He ground them out, barely conscious of what he was doing.

  “Tomas?”

  He swung around, hands up to defend himself.

  It was VeeVee.

  Panting, disheveled, she looked as if she’d been running farther and longer than he had. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about the bad blood between them, or the past week, or anything. What he cared about now was that of all the people in the whole school, he was the one he trusted most to help, the one he knew could help. She ha
d cut down one monster. She could find this one, and when she did—

  “Something took my sister, VeeVee,” he said brokenly.

  “Yes,” she said, struggling to catch her breath. “Let me work.”

  She dropped to one knee and pulled a knife out of her waistband. He wasn’t surprised. VeeVee carried that knife with her everywhere. She closed her eyes, raising the blade above her head, and then holding it out over the ground. He could see her lips moving.

  “Trollking,” she said, getting to her feet and sheathing her athame again. “Did you see it?”

  “I—yes.”

  “Did you see any colored lights? Any lights at all?”

  “What does—VeeVee, we’ve got to go after it!”

  “Yes. But it’s not going to hurt her, Tomas. It needs her. The lights. Did you see any?”

  Frightened as he was for Rosalita, Tomas had to believe that VeeVee knew what she was talking about. And that she wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. “Yeah. A bunch. Around its head. They kept disappearing. And it… it seemed like it was getting bigger.”

  VeeVee smiled sourly. “It was. Those lights? Your sister was calling for help. They were spirits. Trollkings feed on spirit-energy. I don’t know how it got here, but it’s tricking Rosalita into feeding it, and the longer she does, the more powerful it’s going to get. Come on.” She turned, heading back toward the road.

  “Why—wh-where are we going?”

  “Back to the school. If we’re going to hunt it down and get Rosalita back, we need to organize a proper hunting party.”

  By the time the two of them reached the road again, one of the school cars was there, and Señora Clifford and Ms. Smith were helping Mrs. Torres into the back.

  “Tomas?” she gasped, when she saw him.

  “Don’t worry, Mamacita,” he said. “Rosa’s going to be all right.”

  The Trollking had come at the worst possible time—if any time could be said to be a good one. This was the day of the picnic, and some of St. Rhia’s students actually had parents who visited. By the time the school car passed through the gates again, the space in front of the Main Building had already collected a few visitors’ cars. As soon as Ms. Clifford led Mrs. Torres inside, telling her firmly that Rosalita was all right and would be back soon, VeeVee told Ms. Smith everything she knew about what they were facing.